breaking through formulæ, old and new, to these old and silent and
ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times
over, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and
woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for
the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness,
it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe. About
hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice to
Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he
sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were
a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his
philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory
of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and
arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some
questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not
that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided
and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous
and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in
them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to
rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle's tone
invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with
admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity.
Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle's utterances, his hero
worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great
men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were
more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and
his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship
of valour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part
of all healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact
that he, more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of
that modern habit of what is vulgarly called "Going the whole hog."